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Is uber-stalkerishness a word?
You want something creepy, try looking up your house. Yes, see that? That’s your front door. And if you were outside at the wrong time, then yes, that would be you having a smoke on the porch.
When we zoomed out to a full sized map it showed that the stalker service currently only pertains to areas around New York City, Miami, Denver, Las Vegas and our own lovely city by the bay, San Francisco. According to Macworld, the feature will be expanding to more cities sometime soon. We appreciate it: If people in Ohio can look at our front door on the internet, we certainly expect the courtesy of being able to look at theirs. Although we’re not sure why we’d want to.
ZDNet picked up the scent after Google registered the domain name “googlestreetview.com” along with a number of variations. The general consensus of web buzz was that Google would be debuting some kind of new feature for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference, with speakers and events about mapping and geospace (a.k.a. How Big Brother Will Be Watching You In 20 Years 101).
While the conveniences of this feature are fairly obvious (”No, Mom, I’m in the house with the red door. Just look it up online.”), we’ve got to say that it’s freaking us out quite a bit. Granted, it’s not like the maps are a live feed, but at some point we really have to ask what’s necessary and what’s just unnerving.
Google improves Map with street views, miniapps [Macworld]
Google Maps “Street View” to be launched at Where 2.0? [ZDNet]
Comments:
Jun 1, 2007 at 12:26 am
I seem to remember another search engine doing something like this in the past.
Jul 25, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Google is getting a bit over broad…good search engine…um…sure…getting a bit overboard in order to be a search engine…yeah…
May 31, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Sky High-ler!